1. Technical Field
One or more embodiments of the present invention generally relate to power management. In particular, certain embodiments relate to managing power consumption in multi-core processors.
2. Discussion
As the trend toward advanced central processing units (CPUs) with more transistors and higher frequencies continues to grow, computer designers and manufacturers are often faced with corresponding increases in power and energy consumption. Furthermore, manufacturing technologies that provide faster and smaller components can at the same time result in increased leakage power. Particularly in mobile computing environments, increased power consumption can lead to overheating, which may negatively affect performance, and can significantly reduce battery life. Because batteries typically have a limited capacity, running the processor of a mobile computing system more than necessary could drain the capacity more quickly than desired.
Some modern mobile computing systems attempt to conserve power by placing the processor in various power/idle states when there are no instructions to be executed. It should be noted, however, that these solutions are typically tailored for single core processors. As a result, traditional approaches only need to consider the status of a single core when managing power and making power state transition determinations. In addition, it is common for power management to be implemented at the operating system (OS) level, which may be too slow as processor architectures become more complex.